There is something poignant about the way Phoenix Suns president Lon Babby sees the last two years of his team’s evolution.

It was 2010 that Babby and owner Robert Sarver began to map out the future for the Suns, making the decision that they would not trade point guard Steve Nash before his contract ran out last summer, and would instead focus on constructing the post-Nash era.

“I described the situation as, kind of looking at an hourglass, seeing the sands of time passing through the top of the hourglass,” Babby said. “As much as we love Steve and what the seven-seconds-or-less era represented on and off the court, if you looked at it, you could see the sands getting smaller and smaller at the top. We wanted to be ready when the sand all passed through to be able to turn the hourglass over and have a new beginning.”

How, exactly, to execute a new beginning has become an especially relevant subject around the NBA in the wake of the trade that sent James Harden from the Oklahoma City Thunder to the Houston Rockets just before the season began. Over the last five years, culminating in last spring’s Finals, Oklahoma City has provided the paradigm for NBA rebuilds: steadily and carefully adding reasonably priced pieces around a core of stars and keeping the payroll under control while improving each season.

But next year, under the new collective-bargaining agreement, luxury-tax penalties are set to soar. That makes the Rockets-style rebuild all the more attractive—in coming summers, teams are going to have to take long, hard looks at how much they can realistically pay players like Harden.

To accomplish that, Houston GM Daryl Morey shipped out veterans in order to create cap flexibility and collect draft picks. When the Thunder decided the luxury-tax burden of keeping Harden was too much, and that it would be best to trade him, Houston was in position to give up an expiring contract belonging to a talented veteran (Kevin Martin), a young player with significant potential (Jeremy Lamb), two first-round picks and a second-rounder.

It isn’t a foolproof approach, of course. But if there are going to be more Hardens on the trade market in the future, it helps for a rebuilding team to have the assets on hand to grab one of them quickly, either through an in-season trade with a team that expects to lose the player or a sign-and-trade in the summer. And, looking around, there are some potential stars out there in the coming summers. Dwight Howard and Chris Paul will be unrestricted free agents this summer, and are elite players. So will second-tier stars Andrew Bynum, Andre Iguodala (if he exercises his option, as expected), Josh Smith and Al Jefferson. The restricted free-agent market will include youngsters like Brandon Jennings and Tyreke Evans.

Going forward, it is not difficult to see other teams faced with Thunder-like situations. How long will Miami be willing to pay a tax to keep its bunch together, and might they be willing to sacrifice Chris Bosh for tax relief and young pieces? What if things don’t work out with Kevin Love in Minnesota—if they pay Nikola Pekovic and Ricky Rubio what will surely be high market values, would they have to consider dealing Love? It is impossible to say which stars could be on the market. It was a stunner when the Thunder agreed to deal Harden (or when the Jazz, for example, dealt Deron Williams in February 2011, anticipating difficulty in re-signing him). But it pays to keep your team ready to move.

That’s what Babby has done with the Suns. I did ask Babby—who was an agent before joining the Phoenix front-office—if he considered taking the other much-discussed rebuilding path in the NBA: tanking. He pointed out that one of his most prominent former clients, Tim Duncan, wound up going to San Antonio in the 1997 draft only because David Robinson was hurt. The team that was, arguably, tanking that year was the Celtics, and they wound up only with the No. 3 and No. 6 picks. When the Suns were considering how to move forward without Nash, they did consider simply accepting a lot of losing and building through high draft choices.

“That’s something that we have faced ever since I got here, and we have done a lot of research on it,” Babby said. “The likelihood of tanking, if you want to call it that, and putting your fate in the hands of ping-pong balls, it is just nothing that ever appealed to me or, I think, the fans in this market or our ownership. Had you set out to be as bad as you can be in order to improve your position in the lottery, no one could assure me you would wind up with a better draft choice. It is anathema to me to build that way. In most cases, it has failed more often than it has succeeded. I think there are different approaches and I am not sure that approach has been validated over time.”

There is no telling whether the Rockets’ path, which is much the same as the Suns', will be validated. There are only so many stars in the league, and they’re still tough to come by. The Suns do have some quality assets, having signed Goran Dragic in the offseason, with Marcin Gortat in the middle. They acquired four draft picks from the Lakers, and have their own 2012 lottery pick, Kendall Marshall. They’ve taken some chances on two other former Top-4 picks, Michael Beasley and Wes Johnson, and have both on reasonable contracts.

They don’t have the Rockets' quality or quantity of chips—and, indeed, the Suns did try to trade for Harden, too, but couldn’t match Houston’s offer. But they’re getting there. The Suns tried to sign restricted free agent guard Eric Gordon in the summer, but the Hornets matched that contract. Babby said the Suns won’t be afraid to pursue restricted free agents in the future, hopeful that a team will be willing to hear an offer for a sign-and-trade. Fear of the luxury tax will at least nudge more teams into considering letting restricted free agents walk if they can get a good sign-and-trade package in return.

“Sometimes it is circumstances,” Babby said. “You can’t control all the circumstances. But you have got to be ready when those circumstances come up. There are a lot of ways to skin the cat, but I think tanking, it doesn’t work. Making good, disciplined decisions until the right scenarios come up, I think that can work.”

This isn’t clearing out cap space to pursue LeBron James in the summer of 2010. It isn’t tanking a season for the No. 1 pick. It’s simply stockpiling assets and waiting for a tax-weary team to come calling with an available star. And it could prove to be the most effective way to rebuild a roster.